Performance vs Trust: What’s the most desired in a leader?
Every leader wishes to employ a highly motivated, performance-oriented, and trustworthy person, as depicted from the upper right-hand side of the quadrant above.
Then why do organizations fail to evaluate trust as a living-breathing entity of an organization? Let's take a deeper look with inspiration from U.S. Navy Seals.
Organizations have it backward
During organizational performance reviews, most employees are evaluated and promoted based on their performance rather than the trust they exhibited or what is expected from their role.
Interestingly, the Navy Seals termed personnel from the upper left-hand side of the quadrant as toxic!
Regardless of high performance, they were toxic if the person wasn't trustworthy. Organizations should value trust more instead of over-emphasizing performance.
When it comes to challenging scenarios, be it in life or the corporate world, a team built on trust and values is far more nurturing and rewarding than performance-rich teams.
Trust builds long-term performance
Looking at Navy Seals, one question we need to ask ourselves is, can I trust a particular person with my life? Or, in corporate terms, a revenue-centric objective?
Trust has become even more essential as teams move to virtual workspaces and remote work culture is here to stay.
How do you work with someone you have never met in person, or how do you assign OKRs and calculate KPIs in a remote world?
More than performance, it's trust that matters. A team can be well-oiled and groomed for higher periods of productivity only when the team members learn to trust each other, just like a Navy Seal.
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3 周What you celebrate Grows! Metrics make celebration points logical. So what are the top 3 metrics that can be put on a chart for measuring trust and its growth or degrowth?
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2 年Great article Ajay Jay However being on the HR/Performance business, I will share my POV. Organizations have built a system (or forced to build one) that is certainly "objective" as opposed to "subjective" value. While TRUST is a true value, it cannot be measured by means of a rating scale (like a communication or team player as a broader value). TRUST (or loyalty in some context) is purely subjective in the eyes of the beholder (manager, peer or organization). Your peer might not look at your trust worthy, because of the betrayal you might have caused in the process of getting a promotion. Trust has been an unspoken value and has lead to "unconscious bias" and now organization are struggling to find new ways to eliminate that from performance, compensation or other HR decisions. However, if your manager trusts you for you to deliver irrespective of your toxic behavior's towards your peers or within your company, what matters most is that your value to perform for the manager or organization trumps everything else. Cheers.